As if Wilson's harrowing story of Brown's super-Negro strength was not enough to convince the Ferguson police "investigators" that their fellow officer was squeaky clean in this incident, Brown's toxicology report showed he had been smoking pot at some point before he died. A construction worker then told police investigators that he saw Brown with some marijuana the day of the shooting and asked the teenager whether he had tried "wax" - highly concentrated Cannabis oil. Brown was not seen smoking any Cannabis preparations the day of the shooting. The worker did not offer Brown any wax, or say anything about where he might get it. Brown told the worker he had never tried wax before, and that was the end of what should have been considered an irrelevant conversation.

But you can almost see the police investigators' eyes light up upon hearing this tangential information: "SUCCESS!" their tiny brains must've cried, "Not only was Michael Brown a
black criminal, but he was also high! We got him! ... er, well, we already got him, but now WE'VE GOT HIS REPUTATION, too!"

In their ensuing questioning of witnesses, investigators proceeded to lay out the absurd possibility that extremely concentrated hash oil made Brown hallucinate that he was invincible, thus explaining the bizarre part of Wilson's story where a "demon"-eyed Brown "charged" him and required the officer's astute unloading of six rounds into the body of the drug-fueled beast.

Again, nobody saw Brown smoke any kind of pot that day. Depending on rate of use and body type, THC, the primary psychoactive compound in Cannabis, stays in the system for days or weeks. Brown could have smoked the small amount of pot the construction worker saw him with that day, or he could have smoked pot a day or two before. Herbal forms of Cannabis, like the kind Brown allegedly had,rarely have enough THC to induce hallucinations. High concentrations of THC, such as those found in hashish or wax, can. Again, there was no evidence that Brown had access to, possessed, or smoked anything besides enough weed for a joint. Case closed, right?

Wrong:

"... prosecutors still pursued the waxing angle.

The
jurors first heard the term from a police chemist Oct. 7, as he was
being questioned by Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kathi Alizadeh.

“If
one were to ingest that, you would be consuming a higher level of THC
than you would if you were to have smoked or ingested the plant
material?” Alizadeh asked.

The chemist answered, “Yes, you would.”

The questions did not lead to any mention of Brown’s waxing, though, leaving it unclear why they had been raised."

The Post-Dispatch writer seems confused. This is understandable. Allow me to explain: the purpose in pursuing the "waxing angle" was not to discern whether or not Brown actually was suffering from drug-induced hallucinations during the struggle with Wilson. It was pursued and brought up in front of the grand jury in order to highlight - to plant in the minds of the jury, onlookers, reporters, and commentators - yet another possible reason that Brown's life may not have been worth all that much anyway. One does not have to look far to find precedent for such a strategy: Earlier this year, attorneys for Theodore Wafer, the Detroit man who shot 19-year-old Renisha McBride to death for knocking on his front door, also fervently claimed that the victim's use of Cannabis and alcohol that evening somehow justified her dying. (The difference is that Wafer, a private citizen, was put on trial and sent to jail, whereas Wilson, a cop, never even got close)

The idea that Cannabis fuels crime and violence, especially among poor minorities, is nothing new. In the 1930s, during his push for federal Cannabis prohibition, Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger maintained that "Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Negroes" who smoked marijuana were responsible for 50 percent of the violent crimes in their neighborhood. Anslinger also warned that blacks were using marijuana to steal and corrupt virtuous white women, claiming that "marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes." Similarly, a newspaper editorial from 1934 claimed that "Marijuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

Anslinger's racist testimony - really the only testimony that was heard at the time - was instrumental in Congress' decision to pass the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively legalized the racial profiling of minorities under the guise of rooting out potentially dangerous drug users. But the most chilling resonance to the Michael Brown case is found in the Bureau's explanation of marijuana's effects, which it published in pamphlets during Anslinger's reign as chief from 1930 to 1962. This was the text as of 1962:

"The drug produces first an exhaltation with a feeling of well being, a happy, jovial mood, usually; an increased feeling of physical strength and power. Those who are accustomed to habitual use of the drug are said eventually to develop a delirious rage after its administration during which they are temporarily, at least, irresponsible and prone to commit violent crimes. The prolonged use of narcotics is said to produce mental deterioration."

Sound familiar? The above government-concocted myth about Cannabis fits like a glove on the hand of the mythical hulking beast Negro. I'd like to remind you all that it is now 2014, and both of these myths were just deployed - with depressing efficacy - to support the claim that a white police officer was justified in shooting an unarmed black teenager to death, and then leaving his uncovered body to rot on the sidewalk.

The persistent idea that the lives of drug users, especially minority drug users, are worth less than any others amounts to nothing more than absurd discrimination and hypocrisy on the part of the American authorities and the drug-shaming (but secretly drug-loving) American public. The Michael Brown case is yet another example of how our awful and unproductive history of stereotyping and punishing drug users, especially those who have already been "othered" by racism, lives in the present.

As someone who reads a great deal about race in America, the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson did not surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was the slew of blatant, centuries-old myths that the white public and white authorities have subsequently used to justify that decision. The only conceivable reason these myths were drudged up is that, somehow, somewhere, people still believe them. The whole scenario has resulted in a profound distortion of the space-time continuum, in which every day I have trouble answering the deceptively simple question of "what century am I in?"

Although, as Harry Anslinger and the Ferguson police would argue, maybe it's the pot.

2 comments:

The language we see popping up these days in regards to Michael Brown and Darren Wilson is really shocking. As you correctly point out, much of it is centuries old. In my own thesis work I see the same rationale applied to the white slavery scare, where brothels that feature a non-white clientele are consistently characterized by undue amounts of violence - as well as drug and alcohol abuse.

In many ways I think the public reaction to the events of the last couple weeks demonstrates the fallacy of the post-racial myth that the American media is so dedicated to perpetuating.

It all goes back to education, I think, and the importance of seeing the present in the context of the past that created it, something nobody can do if history is not taught well. Ferguson should be a wake up call to educators as much as anybody else.